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A34
world
Guardian www.guardian.co.tt Thursday, June 4, 2015
The biggest news story of the
year was breaking, but the jour-
nalist responsible was fast asleep.
It was just after dawn on May 27
when Andrew Jennings' phone
began ringing. Swiss police had just
launched a startling raid on a luxury
hotel in Zurich, arresting seven top
FIFA officials and charging them
and others with running a $150 mil-
lion racket. The world was stunned.
The waking world, that is. If Jen-
nings had bothered to climb out of
bed, he wouldn't have been sur-
prised at the news. After all, he was
the man who set the investigation
in motion, with a book in 2006,
"FOUL! The Secret World of FIFA:
Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket
Scandals," followed by an exposé
aired on the BBC's Panorama pro-
gramme that same year, and then
another book in 2014, called Omer-
ta: Sepp Blatter's FIFA Organised
Crime Family.
"My phone started ringing at six
in the morning," Jennings said Tues-
day from his farm in the hilly north
of England. "I turned it off actually
to get some more sleep, because
whatever is happening at six in the
morning is still going to be there at
lunch time, isn't it?"
If you can't tell already, Jennings
is an advocate of slow, methodical
journalism. For half a century, the
71-year-old investigative reporter
has been digging into complex,
time-consuming stories about
organised crime. In the 1980s, it
was bad cops, the Thai heroin trade
and the Italian mob. In the '90s, he
turned to sports, exposing corrup-
tion with the International Olympic
Committee.
For the past 15 years, Jennings has
focused on the Federation Interna-
tionale de Football Association
(FIFA), international soccer's gov-
erning body. As other journalists
were ball watching---reporting score-
lines or writing player profiles---Jen-
nings was digging into the dirty
deals underpinning the world's most
popular game.
"Credit in this saga should go to
the dogged obsession of a single
reporter, Andrew Jennings," the
Guardian's Simon Jenkins wrote last
week, citing in particular Jennings's
BBC "Panorama" film called "The
Beautiful Bung: Corruption and the
World Cup."
Now, after decades of threats,
suspicions about tapped phones and
intermittent paychecks, Jennings is
being vindicated with every twist
and turn in the FIFA scandal.
During a phone interview Tuesday
morning with The Washington Post,
he called Fifa President Sepp Blatter
"a dead man walking." Two hours
later, Blatter announced he was step-
ping down, just days after being
reelected.
"I know that they are criminal
scum, and I've known it for years,"
he said. "And that is a thoughtful
summation. That is not an insult.
That is not throwing about wild
words."
"These scum have stolen the peo-
ple's sport. They've stolen it, the
cynical thieving bastards," he said.
"So, yes, it's nice to see the fear on
their faces."
The best way for Americans to
imagine Andrew Jennings is to roll
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
together, then add a touch of a Scot-
tish burr and plenty of flannel. Jen-
nings was born in Scotland but
moved to London as a child. His
grandfather played for a prominent
London soccer team, Clapton Orient
(now called Leyton Orient), but Jen-
nings had little interest in the sport.
He did, however, have a nose for
journalism.
After finishing school, Jennings
joined the Sunday Times in London,
where he got a taste of investigative
journalism. He went to work for the
BBC, but when the network
wouldn't air his documentary on
corruption within Scotland Yard, he
quit and joined a rival programme
called World in Action. He turned
his police investigation into his first
book, Scotland Yard's Cocaine Con-
nection, and a documentary.
"I'm a document hound. If I've
got your documents, I know all
about you," he said. "This journalism
business is easy, you know. You just
find some disgraceful, disgustingly
corrupt people and you work on it!
You have to. That's what we do. The
rest of the media gets far too cozy
with them. It's wrong. Your mother
told you what was wrong. You know
what's wrong. Our job is to inves-
tigate, acquire evidence."
That is, essentially, Jennings's
mantra: Take time, dig up dirt and
don't trust those in power. He
applied the same logic to interna-
tional drug smuggling rings and Ital-
ian mafiosi.
Then sports. After the Scotland
Yard exposé, a colleague at World
In Action named Paul Greengrass---
who later became a Hollywood film-
maker, directing several Jason
Bourne films as well as the recent
blockbuster Captain Phillips--- sug-
gested investigating the IOC.
"I said, What's that?'" Jennings
remembers. Soon, however, the
clueless sports fan would become
steeped in the inner workers of the
Olympic committee. "When I looked
into the IOC, I discovered the pres-
ident, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who
was universally sucked up to by the
sports press, was a Franco fascist.
He thought the wrong side won
World War II." (Samaranch admitted
to serving as Spanish dictator Fran-
cisco Franco's sports minister but
claimed he was not a fascist at
heart.)
When Samaranch stepped down
in 2001, Jennings decided to shift
his focus. "By then I was aware that
there was something very, very
stinky at FIFA," he said.
From prior investigations and
studying organised crime, Jennings
knew he would need sources to
crack open the secretive soccer asso-
ciation. "You know that everywhere,
any organisation, if there is any sign
at all of how corrupt the people at
the top are, there's decent people
down in the middle management,
because they've got mortgages,
they've got children to put through
school," Jennings said. "They are
just employees, and they will have
a sense of proper morality. So you've
got to get them to slip you the stuff
out the back door. It used to be from
the filing cabinet; now it's from the
server."
So the Scotsman decided to
ambush one of Blatter's first news
conferences after being re-elected
in 2002. "I went to the press con-
ference there in their Zurich head-
quarters," he said. "Sloping all up
the walls on either side was the
employees, the robots all in their
Fifa blazers with robotic faces, noth-
ing to say, just lining the walls. So
I said, Right, they're the ones I
want. I've got to get the message to
them that I'm here. I'll cross the
road for a fight. I want it. I'm looking
for it.'"
If Blatter's downfall can be traced
to a single moment, it is probably
the one that came next. When the
Fifa president finished his speech,
Jennings grabbed the microphone
and blurted out a deliberately out-
rageous question.
"I'm surrounded by all these ter-
ribly posh reporters in suits and silk
ties and buttoned up shirts, for God's
sake," he remembered. "And here's
me in me hiking gear. I get the mike
and I said, Herr Blatter, have you
ever taken a bribe?'"
"Talk about crashing the party,"
Jennings recalled Tuesday.
"Reporters are moving away from
me as if I've just let out the biggest
smell since bad food. Well, that's
what I wanted. Thank you, idiot
reporters. The radar dish on top of
my head is spinning around to all
these blazers against the wall, saying,
Here I am. I'm your boy. I'm not
impressed by these tossers. I know
what they are. I've done it to the
IOC, and I'll do it to them.'"
The outcome was doubly golden.
Blatter denied ever taking a bribe,
which gave Jennings a great headline.
But he also got the goods. "Six
weeks later I'm in the dark at about
midnight down where the river in
Zurich widens out into the lake,
standing by a very impressive look-
ing 19th-century office block, won-
dering why I've been asked to go
there by somebody I don't know
when the door opens and I'm
dragged in," Jennings recalls. "I'm
taken into a very posh set of offices
... and within half an hour a senior
Fifa official arrived carrying a won-
derful armful of documents. And it
ran from there. And it still does."
Those documents outlined the
incredible opulence of Fifa's exec-
utive committee, chief among them
Blatter. Jennings reported that Blatter
had been paying himself a secret,
six-figure bonus. "In Herr Blatter's
case, he doesn't know what a sched-
uled flight is. He has no idea. He
hasn't taken one for about 40 years.
He always has to buy a private jet
out of Zurich. Even if he was going
shopping at the local mall, he'd
probably hire one," Jennings said.
"He's got to be given constant evi-
dence that he's a powerful, impor-
tant person. So the big Mercedes
taking him to the private jet engine
at the Zurich airport is what sustains
him."
Blatter threatened to sue Jennings
for defamation but didn't. Jennings
kept digging into the president and
his fellow Fifa executives. At times,
he suspected that his phone had
been tapped, his computer hacked.
In 2006, he published his first
book on the organisation, Foul! The
Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote
Rigging and Ticket Scandals, which
accused Blatter and other top soccer
executives of accepting bribes. The
officials didn't just deny it. Some-
times they physically defended
themselves. "Jack Warner punched
me, spat at me" on camera, Jennings
said. "These guys come out to the
car park and suddenly there's me:
terrible and old and gray and lined,
saying, Excuse me! Did you take
your bribes through this or that
company?' And they go all rigid."
That same year, he aired more
allegations against FIFA on Panora-
ma, a BBC documentary programme
and then more still in 2010 on the
same current affairs show.
"Foul!" earned Jennings a follow-
ing, including admirers within law
enforcement. In 2009, he got a call
from an "ex-spook" who wanted to
introduce Jennings to a few people.
"I go down to London to this
anonymous office block, and you
go in and there are three men with
American accents," Jennings remem-
bers. "They've got government-style
haircuts. They introduce themselves
as FBI special agents and give me
their business cards, which say
organised crime squad.'"
"Bliss," Jennings remembered
thinking. "The European police
forces will do nothing ([about FIFA)
so it was damn good to see profes-
sional investigators get involved."
Jennings was eager to help, and
after making a few phone calls to
sources in the Americas, he sent
confidential Confederation of North,
Central America and Caribbean
Association Football (Concacaf)
financial reports to the FBI and the
IRS. They showed mysterious, mul-
timillion-dollar "commissions," Jen-
nings claimed.
"I said, Right, let's just level the
playing field a bit,'" he said. "And
I gave them the documents that
really got this going."
Jennings trusted the FBI, rather
than his fellow reporters, "to look
at an organisation like Fifa and know
what crooks they are," he said. For
six years, he has used his sources
to stay abreast of the investigation.
Jennings said he knew that a grand
jury had met in the past year to
consider bringing charges but didn't
know who would be charged or
when.
The answer came while Jennings
was sleeping that morning on May
27. Swiss officials arrived en force
to the five-star Baur au Lac hotel
in Zurich, where FIFA's top officials
were meeting ahead of an election
to determine if Blatter would remain
president. In a matter of minutes,
seven current Fifa executives---
including its vice president, Con-
cacaf chief Jeffrey Webb---were
arrested and charged with racket-
eering, bribery, money laundering
and fraud. Seven other men, includ-
ing former Fifa No. 2 Jack Warner,
were also indicted in a Brooklyn
federal court.
"Isn't it wonderful," Jennings said.
"You are in one of the world's most
luxurious hotels, with all expenses
paid, (drinking champagne) on
Tuesday night. And you're still
sleeping it off at six o'clock on
Wednesday morning when there is
a knock, knock, knock. And a police
officer asks: Will you put your
clothes on, sir?'
"They are never going to be in a
luxury hotel again," he said. "They
are going to be in detention in
Switzerland. They will lose their
extradition cases, because I'm sure
the Department of Justice will put
on a good case. The Swiss will have
to let them go (to America). ... Will
they bail them in America? They
are all flight risks. They are all for-
eigners. The first chance they'll be
over the border and gone. So I think
they are going to find out just how
interesting Rikers Island can be."
How a reporter exposed the Fifa
scandal that toppled Sepp Blatter
Andrew Jennings